Faculty Directory

I am the author of 13 books and around 100 journal articles and book chapters, including two target articles in Behavioral and Brain Sciences as well as articles in both Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Since arriving at Maryland in 2001 my work has grown increasingly interdisciplinary. I am now involved in a couple of experimental collaborations arising from my work, one with others here on campus and one with colleagues in the UK. Before coming to the University of Maryland I was at the University of Sheffield (UK), where I founded and directed the Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies, resulting in a number of edited volumes of interdisciplinary essays. In a previous incarnation I trained as a Wittgensteinian (at the University of Leeds), got my DPhil from Oxford (working with Michael Dummett), and published a couple of monographs on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I have also published books on epistemology, and on ethics, and continue to have interests in these areas.I am a member of the organizing committee for the University of Maryland Cognitive Science Colloquium.

• Philosophy of mind
• Philosophy of psychology
• Cognitive science
• Theories of consciousness
• Knowledge of our own propositional attitudes
• Role of natural language in human cognition
• Modularity of mind
• Mentality of animals
• Nature and status of our folk psychology
• Nativism (innateness) 
• Human creativity